OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Scale-free vision-based aerial control of a ground formation with hybrid topology
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel vision-based control method to make a group of ground mobile robots achieve a specified formation shape with unspecified size. Our approach uses multiple aerial control units equipped with downward-facing cameras, each observing a partial subset of the multirobot team. The units compute the control commands from the ground robots' image projections, using neither calibration nor scene scale information, and transmit them to the robots. The control strategy relies on the calculation of image similarity transformations, and we show it to be asymptotically stable if the overlaps between the subsets of controlled robots satisfy certain conditions. The presence of the supervisory units, which coordinate their motions to guarantee a correct control performance, gives rise to a hybrid system topology. All in all, the proposed system provides relevant practical advantages in simplicity and flexibility. Within the problem of controlling a team shape, our contribution lies in addressing several simultaneous challenges: the controller needs only partial information of the robotic group, does not use distance measurements or global reference frames, is designed for unicycle agents, and can accommodate topology changes. We present illustrative simulation results.
What Makes a Great Software Quality Assurance Engineer?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Engineers are responsible for assessing a product during every phase of the software development process to ensure that the outcomes of each phase and the final product possess the desired qualities. In general, a great SQA engineer needs to have a different set of abilities from development engineers to effectively oversee the entire product development process from beginning to end. Recent empirical studies identified important attributes of software engineers and managers, but the quality assurance role is overlooked. As software quality aspects have become more of a priority in the life cycle of software development, employers seek professionals that best suit the company's objectives and new graduates desire to make a valuable contribution through their job as an SQA engineer, but what makes them great? We addressed this knowledge gap by conducting 25 semi-structured interviews and 363 survey respondents with software quality assurance engineers from different companies around the world. We use the data collected from these activities to derive a comprehensive set of attributes that are considered important. As a result of the interviews, twenty-five attributes were identified and grouped into five main categories: personal, social, technical, management, and decision-making attributes. Through a rating survey, we confirmed that the distinguishing characteristics of great SQA engineers are curiosity, the ability to communicate effectively, and critical thinking skills. This work will guide further studies with SQA practitioners, by considering contextual factors and providing some implications for research and practice.
Quantifying the Impact of Frame Preemption on Combined TSN Shapers
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Different scheduling mechanisms in Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) can be integrated together to design and support complex architectures with enhanced capabilities for mixed critical networks. Integrating Frame Preemption (FP) with Credit-Based Shaper (CBS) and Gate Control List (GCL) opens up different modes and configuration choices resulting in a complex evaluation of several possibilities and their impact on the Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we implement and quantify the integration of preemptive CBS with GCL by incorporating FP into the architecture. Our experiments show that the end-to-end delay of Audio Video Bridging (AVB) flows shaped by CBS reduces significantly (up to 40\%) when AVB flows are set to preemptable class. We further show that the jitter of Time Triggered (TT) traffic remains unaffected in "with Hold/Release" mode. Furthermore, we propose to introduce Guardband (GB) in the "without Hold/Release" to reduce the jitter of the TT flow. We compare all the different integration modes, starting with CBS with GCL, extending it further to FP. We evaluate all feasible combinations in both synthetic and realistic scenarios and offer recommendations for practical configuration methods.
How Good is ChatGPT at Face Biometrics? A First Look into Recognition, Soft Biometrics, and Explainability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT developed by OpenAI, have already shown astonishing results, introducing quick changes in our society. This has been intensified by the release of ChatGPT which allows anyone to interact in a simple conversational way with LLMs, without any experience in the field needed. As a result, ChatGPT has been rapidly applied to many different tasks such as code- and song-writer, education, virtual assistants, etc., showing impressive results for tasks for which it was not trained (zero-shot learning). The present study aims to explore the ability of ChatGPT, based on the recent GPT-4 multimodal LLM, for the task of face biometrics. In particular, we analyze the ability of ChatGPT to perform tasks such as face verification, soft-biometrics estimation, and explainability of the results. ChatGPT could be very valuable to further increase the explainability and transparency of automatic decisions in human scenarios. Experiments are carried out in order to evaluate the performance and robustness of ChatGPT, using popular public benchmarks and comparing the results with state-of-the-art methods in the field. The results achieved in this study show the potential of LLMs such as ChatGPT for face biometrics, especially to enhance explainability. For reproducibility reasons, we release all the code in GitHub.
Using Java Geometry Expert as Guide in the Preparations for Math Contests
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

We give an insight into Java Geometry Expert (JGEX) in use in a school context, focusing on the Austrian school system. JGEX can offer great support in some classroom situations, especially for solving mathematical competition tasks. Also, we discuss some limitations of the program.
EMP: Effective Multidimensional Persistence for Graph Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Topological data analysis (TDA) is gaining prominence across a wide spectrum of machine learning tasks that spans from manifold learning to graph classification. A pivotal technique within TDA is persistent homology (PH), which furnishes an exclusive topological imprint of data by tracing the evolution of latent structures as a scale parameter changes. Present PH tools are confined to analyzing data through a single filter parameter. However, many scenarios necessitate the consideration of multiple relevant parameters to attain finer insights into the data. We address this issue by introducing the Effective Multidimensional Persistence (EMP) framework. This framework empowers the exploration of data by simultaneously varying multiple scale parameters. The framework integrates descriptor functions into the analysis process, yielding a highly expressive data summary. It seamlessly integrates established single PH summaries into multidimensional counterparts like EMP Landscapes, Silhouettes, Images, and Surfaces. These summaries represent data's multidimensional aspects as matrices and arrays, aligning effectively with diverse ML models. We provide theoretical guarantees and stability proofs for EMP summaries. We demonstrate EMP's utility in graph classification tasks, showing its effectiveness. Results reveal that EMP enhances various single PH descriptors, outperforming cutting-edge methods on multiple benchmark datasets.
Supporting Sensemaking of Large Language Model Outputs at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.
Intermittency versus Path Loss in RIS-aided THz Communication: A Data Significance Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The transition to Terahertz (THz) frequencies, providing an ultra-wide bandwidth, is a key driver for future wireless communication networks. However, the specific properties of the THz channel, such as severe path loss and vulnerability to blockage, pose a significant challenge in balancing data rate and reliability. This work considers reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided THz communication, where the effective exploitation of a strong, but intermittent line-of-sight (LOS) path versus a reliable, yet weaker RIS-path is studied. We introduce a mixed-criticality superposition coding scheme that addresses this tradeoff from a data significance perspective. The results show that the proposed scheme enables reliable transmission for a portion of high-criticality data without significantly impacting the overall achievable sum rate and queuing delay. Additionally, we gain insights into how the LOS blockage probability and the channel gain of the RIS-link influence the rate performance of our scheme.
A Training Rate and Survival Heuristic for Inference and Robustness Evaluation (TRASHFIRE)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning models -- deep neural networks in particular -- have performed remarkably well on benchmark datasets across a wide variety of domains. However, the ease of finding adversarial counter-examples remains a persistent problem when training times are measured in hours or days and the time needed to find a successful adversarial counter-example is measured in seconds. Much work has gone into generating and defending against these adversarial counter-examples, however the relative costs of attacks and defences are rarely discussed. Additionally, machine learning research is almost entirely guided by test/train metrics, but these would require billions of samples to meet industry standards. The present work addresses the problem of understanding and predicting how particular model hyper-parameters influence the performance of a model in the presence of an adversary. The proposed approach uses survival models, worst-case examples, and a cost-aware analysis to precisely and accurately reject a particular model change during routine model training procedures rather than relying on real-world deployment, expensive formal verification methods, or accurate simulations of very complicated systems (\textit{e.g.}, digitally recreating every part of a car or a plane). Through an evaluation of many pre-processing techniques, adversarial counter-examples, and neural network configurations, the conclusion is that deeper models do offer marginal gains in survival times compared to more shallow counterparts. However, we show that those gains are driven more by the model inference time than inherent robustness properties. Using the proposed methodology, we show that ResNet is hopelessly insecure against even the simplest of white box attacks.
FoVA-Depth: Field-of-View Agnostic Depth Estimation for Cross-Dataset Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Wide field-of-view (FoV) cameras efficiently capture large portions of the scene, which makes them attractive in multiple domains, such as automotive and robotics. For such applications, estimating depth from multiple images is a critical task, and therefore, a large amount of ground truth (GT) data is available. Unfortunately, most of the GT data is for pinhole cameras, making it impossible to properly train depth estimation models for large-FoV cameras. We propose the first method to train a stereo depth estimation model on the widely available pinhole data, and to generalize it to data captured with larger FoVs. Our intuition is simple: We warp the training data to a canonical, large-FoV representation and augment it to allow a single network to reason about diverse types of distortions that otherwise would prevent generalization. We show strong generalization ability of our approach on both indoor and outdoor datasets, which was not possible with previous methods.
A Unified Approach to Emotion Detection and Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In current text-based task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, user emotion detection (ED) is often overlooked or is typically treated as a separate and independent task, requiring additional training. In contrast, our work demonstrates that seamlessly unifying ED and TOD modeling brings about mutual benefits, and is therefore an alternative to be considered. Our method consists in augmenting SimpleToD, an end-to-end TOD system, by extending belief state tracking to include ED, relying on a single language model. We evaluate our approach using GPT-2 and Llama-2 on the EmoWOZ benchmark, a version of MultiWOZ annotated with emotions. Our results reveal a general increase in performance for ED and task results. Our findings also indicate that user emotions provide useful contextual conditioning for system responses, and can be leveraged to further refine responses in terms of empathy.
Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.
A V2X-based Privacy Preserving Federated Measuring and Learning System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Future autonomous vehicles (AVs) will use a variety of sensors that generate a vast amount of data. Naturally, this data not only serves self-driving algorithms; but can also assist other vehicles or the infrastructure in real-time decision-making. Consequently, vehicles shall exchange their measurement data over Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies. Moreover, predicting the state of the road network might be beneficial too. With such a prediction, we might mitigate road congestion, balance parking lot usage, or optimize the traffic flow. That would decrease transportation costs as well as reduce its environmental impact. In this paper, we propose a federated measurement and learning system that provides real-time data to fellow vehicles over Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication while also operating a federated learning (FL) scheme over the Vehicle-to-Network (V2N) link to create a predictive model of the transportation network. As we are yet to have real-world AV data, we model it with a non-IID (independent and identically distributed) dataset to evaluate the capabilities of the proposed system in terms of performance and privacy. Results indicate that the proposed FL scheme improves learning performance and prevents eavesdropping at the aggregator server side.
Unmasking and Quantifying Racial Bias of Large Language Models in Medical Report Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models like GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 hold promise for healthcare professionals, but they may inadvertently inherit biases during their training, potentially affecting their utility in medical applications. Despite few attempts in the past, the precise impact and extent of these biases remain uncertain. Through both qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that these models tend to project higher costs and longer hospitalizations for White populations and exhibit optimistic views in challenging medical scenarios with much higher survival rates. These biases, which mirror real-world healthcare disparities, are evident in the generation of patient backgrounds, the association of specific diseases with certain races, and disparities in treatment recommendations, etc. Our findings underscore the critical need for future research to address and mitigate biases in language models, especially in critical healthcare applications, to ensure fair and accurate outcomes for all patients.
Simplified Successive Cancellation List Decoding of PAC Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Polar codes are the first class of structured channel codes that achieve the symmetric capacity of binary channels with efficient encoding and decoding. In 2019, Arikan proposed a new polar coding scheme referred to as polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC)} codes. In contrast to polar codes, PAC codes precode the information word using a convolutional code prior to polar encoding. This results in material coding gain over polar code under Fano sequential decoding as well as successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. Given the advantages of SCL decoding over Fano decoding in certain scenarios such as low-SNR regime or where a constraint on the worst case decoding latency exists, in this paper, we focus on SCL decoding and present a simplified SCL (SSCL) decoding algorithm for PAC codes. SSCL decoding of PAC codes reduces the decoding latency by identifying special nodes in the decoding tree and processing them at the intermediate stages of the graph. Our simulation results show that the performance of PAC codes under SSCL decoding is almost similar to the SCL decoding while having lower decoding latency.
HMM for Discovering Decision-Making Dynamics Using Reinforcement Learning Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Major depressive disorder (MDD) presents challenges in diagnosis and treatment due to its complex and heterogeneous nature. Emerging evidence indicates that reward processing abnormalities may serve as a behavioral marker for MDD. To measure reward processing, patients perform computer-based behavioral tasks that involve making choices or responding to stimulants that are associated with different outcomes. Reinforcement learning (RL) models are fitted to extract parameters that measure various aspects of reward processing to characterize how patients make decisions in behavioral tasks. Recent findings suggest the inadequacy of characterizing reward learning solely based on a single RL model; instead, there may be a switching of decision-making processes between multiple strategies. An important scientific question is how the dynamics of learning strategies in decision-making affect the reward learning ability of individuals with MDD. Motivated by the probabilistic reward task (PRT) within the EMBARC study, we propose a novel RL-HMM framework for analyzing reward-based decision-making. Our model accommodates learning strategy switching between two distinct approaches under a hidden Markov model (HMM): subjects making decisions based on the RL model or opting for random choices. We account for continuous RL state space and allow time-varying transition probabilities in the HMM. We introduce a computationally efficient EM algorithm for parameter estimation and employ a nonparametric bootstrap for inference. We apply our approach to the EMBARC study to show that MDD patients are less engaged in RL compared to the healthy controls, and engagement is associated with brain activities in the negative affect circuitry during an emotional conflict task.
How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

It is now commonplace for organizations to pay developers to work on specific open source software (OSS) projects to pursue their business goals. Such paid developers work alongside voluntary contributors, but given the different motivations of these two groups of developers, conflict may arise, which may pose a threat to a project's sustainability. This paper presents an empirical study of paid developers and volunteers in Rust, a popular open source programming language project. Rust is a particularly interesting case given considerable concerns about corporate participation. We compare volunteers and paid developers through contribution characteristics and long-term participation, and solicit volunteers' perceptions on paid developers. We find that core paid developers tend to contribute more frequently; commits contributed by one-time paid developers have bigger sizes; peripheral paid developers implement more features; and being paid plays a positive role in becoming a long-term contributor. We also find that volunteers do have some prejudices against paid developers. This study suggests that the dichotomous view of paid vs. volunteer developers is too simplistic and that further subgroups can be identified. Companies should become more sensitive to how they engage with OSS communities, in certain ways as suggested by this study.